The Silent Disco Stage at a Metal Festival

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Midnight, a tent behind the main stages, and a few hundred people in battle vests and corpse paint are dancing in total silence. No bassline leaks out, no PA rattles the guy ropes. What you get instead is the sound of several hundred human voices, all a semitone apart, howling along to a chorus only they can hear through a pair of glow-in-the-dark headphones, at a volume that would embarrass a karaoke bar. Someone near me is doing the entire chorus of an Abba song with his eyes shut and both fists in the air, three channels of colour-coded headphones flicking between a Europop set, a nu-metal set, and — I checked twice — a channel of nothing but 1980s power ballads. This is the silent disco tent, and it has become one of the strangest fixtures on the modern European festival circuit, including, improbably, at festivals built entirely around the idea that music should be loud enough to hurt.

Silent-Disco - vo.rs

The Silent Disco Stage at a Metal Festival